Culture Chronicle

Governors Island Vision Adds Hills and Hammocks
The New York Times - April 12, 2010
By Nicolai Ouroussoff

When the federal government sold Governors Island to the City and State of New York for one dollar in January 2003, it wasn't clear who had gotten the short end of the stick.

Was it really worth a dollar? Few people had visited the island since it was abandoned by the Coast Guard in 1997. For those who could get onto it, the charm of the 19th- and early-20th-century military buildings on the north end wore off as soon as they saw the southern end, a flat sprawl of concrete barracks and warehouses from the 1970s and '80s. And in an era when government was increasingly dependent on the private sector to finance what once would have been public initiatives, it was hard to see how the city and state would ever raise the money to develop the island themselves. (A few proposals being tossed around at the time, including a global peace park and a theme SpongeBob SquarePants hotel, didn't inspire confidence.)

But Sunday's announcement that the City of New York has reached a deal to take control of the island from the state and will push ahead with a plan that includes a 2.2-mile-long waterfront promenade and a 40-acre park, offers reassuring evidence that even in difficult times it is possible to get the tricky balance between public good and private interests right -- or at least right enough.

The plan, by Adriaan Geuze of the Dutch landscape architecture firm West 8, calls for a park that, if realized, will eventually include a cluster of steep, artificially created hills that form a focal point at the park's center, visually tying it back to the city. Its wildly original array of parkscapes -- including a "hammock grove," a grottolike shelter, playing fields and marshlands -- will give the island the kind of strong identity it currently lacks. When considered with Michael Van Valkenburgh's Brooklyn Bridge Park, under construction across the harbor in Brooklyn, it represents a shift in the character of the city's park system as a whole that is as revolutionary as Robert Moses' early public works projects or Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's Central Park. For the full article, click here